This is a little off topic based on what I usually blog about, but as it falls under one of my areas of interest, here goes:

We each have three main senses with which we engage the world: our eyes, our ears and our physical touch/feeling. In psychology terms, these senses are referred to as: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Most of us don’t rely too much on our sense of taste or smell, although there are exceptions, such as those who taste wine or cook for a living. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m lumping taste and smell in with physical feeling. The majority of us use one of the three main senses as their primary sense and one of the other two senses as their backup sense. The third sense is not commonly used. In the world in which I grew up (1960s/70s), most men were physical/visual and most women were auditory/visual. Notice that most men didn’t use their ears. Equally, most women didn’t engage with the world physically, at least not in the sporty way that men did.

Clearly this is a generalisation, as we’re all capable of using all of our senses. It’s just that when we’re not paying 100% attention, we tend to habituate on a single, favourite sense. There are a few remarkable people who you’ll meet once in a while, who use all three senses the whole of the time. You don’t meet a lot of them, but when you do you’ll know about it because they’ll run rings around you! The differing use of senses I’ve described led to the following oft-cited comparison: men are from Mars, women are from Venus. This isn’t too surprising, as the primary sense that each sex uses to engage with the world is different. In my formative years men were always fighting each other, while women were always bashing each other with words. The one thing that both sexes could agree on was what looks right – i.e. they both had a shared secondary sense.

Having generalised, let’s examine the oddballs. Musicians tend to be auditory/physical or physical/auditory, which makes sense. The ears give appreciation of sounds, the physical awareness provides the timing. Evey once in a while (to borrow a slang term from back home) one runs into a ‘geezer-bird’ – a lady who is physical/visual, and hence more at home drinking and watching sports with a gang of guys. For my part, I’m auditory/visual, so I tend to get on better with women than men.

You get the idea.

Over the last 40 years something strange has happened, observable in the Millennials and the end of Gen-Y. Men & women and boys & girls have become sort of androgynous, as in they get on far better together than my generation ever did. I’m convinced that the reason for this is the massive upsurge in visual entertainment. All that TV and film has reengineered humans so that both sexes now use their visual sense as their primary sense, causing an entire generation to experience the world in the same way. When I was growing up we had a black and white TV, four channels only and no video recorder. My dad would use a reel to reel tape recorder to record Capt Scarlet or Thunderbirds which my brother and I would then listen to later, filling in the pictures in our heads. I’m sure this the reason that my senses work the way they do. That and a horrible accident when I was about 6, which caused me to switch off my feelings, to avoid getting physically hurt again.

If I was one of those conspiracy chaps, I’d now claim that Hollywood, run by the CIA, has been involved in a clandestine operation for the last 50 years to change the way that humans are wired, forcing both sexes to use their eyes as their primary sense, and forgetting about their ears and their feelings. As I’m not that way inclined, I think it was an accident, although the result is the same: people get on far better than they used to. The downside is that now everyone uses their eyes first and foremost, the world has become a very uniform place.